Like this:

I cannot recommend highly enough Sarah Jean Grimm‘s “Soft Focus” from Metatron out of Montreal. The poem above grabbed me by the throat. I still have the finger marks from last night’s reading. Buy the book (might I suggest the entire Spring 2017 catalog?) and support great, living poets.

Like this:

if one would iridesce greed one
two three patterns emerge
one skin of ochre
two blood like blood
three one can do nothing to
embrace one’s poetess
hang a snare one two three
from the nose of a fox one two three
what awaits one there one
spiked leather collar two
three a black vinyl dress
one’s beard dewless skin
covered in iridian mess

Like this:

Wikipedia Poem, No. 413

“But they know how to pull / Arms in, a reflex of being dressed, / And also, a child’s faith. The mass of stuff / That makes the Sunday frocks collapses / In my hands and finds its shape, only because / They understand the drape of it— / These skinny keys to intricate locks.” Mark Jarman

For Bill

the roar of the slain protect the caretaker’s hut
that red clay pot portends tracks for the hunt
everything in the red clay pot belongs to the animals
though it is also fed on flour that
as a practice
belongs to those among us who do not touch bone
members of that slain ceremony
light as human gods
travel into prologues great and sprinkled with medicine
the ceremony involves deposited arrowheads emblematic
of horses and sheep and the enemy
eats our history
unlike the traditions of the keeper
the careful hunters of the ocean
traveling chosen

Like this:

Wikipedia Poem, No. 409

“I am always tying up / and then deciding to depart.” Frank O’Hara

a trap set with
electric tongues
mouse in-
advertently cleft
itemized by tongues
transport terms arranged
into two recursively
out bloody breast bones
you have something
observer some sheet of
margins imagine it the
sense intelligence simmering
both your final form
and the sound beneath
some shared irreverence
ends in the itemized bits
which sit on the trap
of your mouth
in the tv room
under warm blankets
covering a trap
set with
tongues

i begin to the next
groan
i spend climb
the old snow on the thigh and
fall—
fall one day i begin
to keep up
at
night
reappear
blows
of
bear-transcendence
the fairway i
begin to hunt him down as i knew
i would
and which i lurch
the word "hunt" appears precisely
no time in Gallway Kinnell's
poem
no
mattering wonder old snow the bear him
and digest of the wind
at
the
flyway
in her ravine
in
the bear's
blood the world
at
dismayal
i awaken
i
tottering wonder
old snow the dismayed
i awaken a third
i
begin toward winter and
gnash it up
splash on think
must rise
come to the trail behind
me
and down
my nostrils
flared
and which
way to
begin the seventh day